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Tell the agent, that's fine (you can opt not to have the surgery) if you'd rather take the chance of starting your client's service time clock in 2015 or 2016 as opposed to 2014. We'd love to have him for an extra year assuming his career plays out like we think. Maybe that was their thinking all along? If Carl were still in charge, maybe, but the team has not pinch pennies in quite a while.

I'm with you. He's the godfather of baseball player's elbows, but he gives you a medical opinion and you need to make a decision based on what's best for your organization. I would have asked him to handicap it for me. What are the odds he'll need TJ surgery in the next 5 years? If it's more than a 10% chance, then do the surgery. Given the large number of players who don't avoid the knife with rest, I'm sure Dr. Andrews would have said it was higher. See, from the doc's point of view he probably reasons, well there's a 50/50 or even slightly less chance he may not need surgery, so lets wait. But the team has to consider their situation. We would have stood to lose VERY little by doing the surgery last September. We were sucking and we knew we probably weren't contending this year anyway but it certainly would be nice to put some butts in the seats in 2014. (If they had done the surgery) Miguel wouldn't have lost any development time during the season, he just would have been rehabbing during the offseason and he'd be in camp getting ready for the 2014 season - instead of losing it completely.

The Twins knew there were problems with his elbow last year. This is another example of poor mgmt on the Twins part. Even if the doc says he doesn't "require" TJ surgery because he only has a partial tear, the only reasonable answer the Twins front office should have given is "well we are counting on him being our 3B for the next 8 years, so let's get this taken care of this winter before we really need him." There is no excuse for this situation. My bigger concern is that this could derail his development, both at the plate and in the field. It's not easy to stop hitting for 8 months then pick right up where you left off. Plus there's the weight thing he'll have to attend to. This isn't a surprise. Both the surgery or the way the Twins handled it. This team doesn't think far enough ahead and it doesn't analyze situations or players with much depth. Thank god for our scouting and minor league pitching/hitting coaches or we'd really be in trouble. IMO, the former deficiencies will prevent this team from bringing home a World Series Championship in the next 10 years, even though we have a stacked farm system that will get even better after this year's draft. How's that for spring optimism?

Never underestimate the power of the contract year. I'd take the over on 20 HR based on this fact alone, not to mention the fact that there is a serious lack of available power hitters coming through FA in recent years (unless you want to pay +$100M). He could probably get a nice deal if he hits 25+ bombs and OPS's over .875. With a good to decent year, Josh could possibly double his career earnings with his next contract. But a poor year could mean struggling to find a job in 2015 - how's that for motivation!

Nate Freiman pops into my mind, speaking of this topic. He has no business being on a typical MLB roster. Coming into 2013, his age 26! season, he had never played above AA. The dude is 6'8" and as such is limited to 1B or DH. But he hits LH pitching pretty well. He OPS'd over .800 against lefties last year and got some clutch hits for the A's. You can afford to do things like this, but only if you have a good bullpen, a manager who will platoon or play splits, and you have to have a few other players who are versatile enough to play multiple positions. This whole conversation was kind of a mute point because for the most part we couldn't hit period last year, regardless of how we played matchups.

Awesome event, thanks for doing this John, Aaron, Parker, Seth, and Brock (sorry if I left anyone out)!

Questions for the Panel: Dave St. Peter: What is a day or week in the life of DSP like? Scott Erickson: Which pitcher from today's game reminds him of himself? "What's he been up to lately?" "Which hitters did he love facing, which ones crushed him?" John Paley: "What themes do you see your next film focusing on" "What sort of support or resistance did MLB or the Twins give you in the making of Pelotero?" "Could baseball academies, ala the DR, work in the US... are there such places or is it more of a camp/retreat approach?" "Which teams are the best at finding talent in the DR and why?" "Vladimir Guerrero riding barefoot on the back of moped as an uninvited guest to a tryout is a great story, any other great stories like this out of the DR where guys showed up out of the blue and blew the scouts away?"

Wow, those are amazing splits and it underscores one of the big faults to the Twins hitting philosophy. For the most part, Twins hitters seem to guess very rarely. I'd like to seem them guess a lot more. Way too often our hitters seem to try to cover the whole plate or look to slap the ball oppo, even before they get 2 strikes. I really hope the coaching staff is looking at this and will develop a cheat sheet for each opposing pitcher regarding what they like to do on 0-0, 0-1, 1-0, and 1-1 counts. If our hitters can do a better job of guessing on these early counts hopefully they'll either hit balls harder earlier in the count, effectively increasing their OPS earlier in the count (by taking the same approach as if it was 2-0 or 3-1). And if it helps them get in hitters count, then all the better. There's no excuse for swinging at pitches outside the zone with less than two strikes. It would be really interesting to see a comparison of Twins hitters O-swing% versus other teams in the league with less than 2 strikes. Maybe somebody with more time and expertise with the data could look into that. And it would be interesting to compare the difference in ISO between AAA/AA and the majors for Twins players versus players from other teams. It seems like our guys have a much harder time getting SLG to transfer from the minors to the majors. If our coaching staff can't address this (if we truly are below average in this regard), it makes all our projections about future prospect stardom a mute point. These are the metrics we should use to grade our manager and hitting coaches.

I have some pretty strong feelings on the matter. It is obvious that Gardy and his staff must go. TR should be demoted to head of scouting or player development. Here's why this is the only defensible course of action: TR and his staff has a great eye for young players, but they do a horrendous job of signing free agents. I can't find the link, but somebody did a great analysis a few weeks ago illustrating how well different teams have done signing FA's back to 1995. Minnesota fared terrible. But that just puts numbers next to what we already know, this team consistently throws away money every offseason. TR has made some nice trades but we need to do a better job of filling in the gaps on our team if we are ever going to seriously compete. The bigger problem is Gardenhire, and not so much him, but his staff. We know he didn't have a great squad to work with, but I don't think it should have been this bad. Gardy has a few different problems that will always limit us so long as he is the manager. First, he does not platoon or seem to give much thought to playing matchups. Second, he favors 'scrappy' guys and insists his young hitters fit the Twins 'spray the ball around' mold. Third, his staff is just not paying attention. Three examples of #3, that I think are fireable offenses, if not for Gardy, at least the pitching and hitting coaches. First one... Colabello's first few weeks in the majors, he goes like 1 for his first 24 with 15 K's (or thereabouts), I watched two minutes of a game against Milwaukee and could see he wouldn't reach the outside part of the plate with a broom handle. It took a call from Tony f'ing Olivia to tell him to move closer, he did and shortly thereafter he went on a hot streak. Watching Morneau in early July, his head was moving so much it was obvious why he was struggling to make contact. I said to a friend, "watch, if he stops moving his head so much he's going to get hot", a few weeks later he did and he said it came about because him and Joe Mauer looked at video and talked about it. Finally, on hitting, this team is way too reactive... very few of the hitters seem to guess or anticipate early in the count. We are constantly fouling pitches off that should be ripped in the gap. If you're a hitter, you've got to guess. Second example, we trotted out just above everyone to try as a starter and yet Anthony Swarzak remained in the pen despite consistently pitching well in longer relief stints. Why not give him another crack at the rotation. Also, Samuel Deduno. Guy obviously has nasty stuff, but the inability of the coaching staff to get him to throw strikes is frustrating. Also, Mike Pelfrey. His arm was really live given it was on an operating table last year, but he has got to change speeds. That killed him this year. In several starts I watched he was often squeezed by the umpire but he also had guys hit a lot of quality pitches very hard. Keep guys off balance more and they won't do that. I won't even mention Liriano. Even though I'm pissed this staff didn't do better, this was just not a good lineup or a good staff. At best they were going to be maybe .500 or a touch better. Finally, as to Gardy. Gardy talks endlessly about doing the fundamental things to win but each night we'd see sloppy play. At some point the blame for shifts to the manager. Maybe we'll time it right in 2 to 3 years and get lucky but unless we do the following: - get a better return on free agent dollars (to fill in around core players) - take smarter at-bats instead of always looking to slap the ball the other way - play the percentages to gain an advantage - get more out of the pitchers we have in AA-MLB We might end up wasting the prime years of Sano-Buxton-Arcia-Meyer the same way we wasted the prime years of Mauer-Morneau-Santana-Nathan. The 2013 Baseball Prospectus preview of the Twins was spot on. To paraphrase: TK was Gardy's mentor. Most people tend to emulate their mentors but amplify their mentor's points of emphasis. When strategies or viewpoints are taken to an extreme, they usually collapse. Gardy has taken the "fundamental" approach preached by TK to an extreme at it has come at the expense of things like power and strikeouts. The results of 2013 were disappointing, though not unexpected. What was more worrisome to me was to see so little change in the way things are done despite our 3rd 90+ loss season in a row. I think 2013 exposed some big flaws in how this team was built and how it was managed.

I think it also points out just how poor the front office has been at signing free agents, something you don't need a terrific table like this to tell you. The other clubs who spent relatively close to the same was OAK, Toronto, KC, and Tampa Bay. I might buy the explanation that for much of this time the Twins were trapped in stadium resembling a plastic grocery bag, so they weren't going to get a deal on FA's. Course Oakland's Coliseum is no palace either, but hey, it's CA. But that said, the A's and the Rays got nearly twice as much WAR out of their free agents as the Twins, while spending a similar amount. It's black and white, TR and BS have been dreadful in terms of spending the owner's money wisely. Why on earth wouldn't ownership make TR head of scouting (or some such title) and install a new GM to handle FA analysis/signing? Instead they bring him back and installed one of "his guys" as GM after he retired? So weird.

The same! And I'm back in the homeland after a decade up north. Unfortunately the internet ate my old username/postings, but I'm all about fresh starts these days.

Good to see LNP is still at it... here's a link to a video of him sliding head first on a hit to the outfield. Y! SPORTS